Sectoral Investigation of Asymmetries in the Conditional Mean Dynamics of the Real U.S. GDP

We investigate asymmetries in the conditional mean dynamics of four sectors of the U.S. GDP data. Since the statistical evidence on nonlinearities in the conditional mean could be influenced by the presence of outliers, or by a failure to model conditional heteroskedasticity, we explicitly account for outliers by assuming that the innovations are drawn from the stable family, and model time-varying volatility by a GARCH(1,1) process. We also allow for the possibility of long memory in the series with fractional differencing. Our results indicate only weak evidence of significant nonlinearities in the conditional mean in some sectors of the GDP.